]]>If you want to go fast – go alone. If you want to go far – go together. This African proverb is a great place to start as you consider building real teams in an attempt to go far.

Not every group that gathers around a conference table to share weekly updates is a team. A real team is made up of a small number of people with complementary skills, committed to a common purpose. They have common performance goals and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Let’s take a closer look at each of the elements, that when they all come together, make a successful team:

Small number: Numbers can vary, but generally, two to twenty-five people constitutes a team. More than twenty-five becomes too unwieldy; people have trouble interacting and agreeing on details. One side note: Even with a smaller number of members, your meetings will still need to be organized and run smoothly. Don’t just tell people to show up. Tell them why they are coming, how they should prepare, and what they should bring. For example, sending out an agenda with action items a few days prior is an effective way to achieve this. People need to see the purpose of a meeting, otherwise it will feel like a chore to them.

Complementary skills: These are really important because it’s how the work gets done—or, in the worst case scenario, how the work doesn’t get done. A team will, for the most part, need three different types of skills:

Technical or functional expertise:Every project has technical requirements that need to be met. Leaders must be able to assess the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to meet those requirements.

Problem-solving and decision-making skills: Many times, teams consist of great technical people that struggle solving business issues. If no one can make a decision, whether it is at the task or project level, then nothing gets done: “The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.” – John Foster Dulles (1888 – 1959), U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Interpersonal skills: Teams need people who are willing to help, willing to ask for help, and willing to be understanding and empathetic. The lack of these skills is the most likely cause of teamwork failure.

Common purpose: Organizations need a higher purpose to inspire passion. This is true for teams as well. If the members are there just for a paycheck, then you’ll have to find a common purpose and meaning for the project. This will be the glue that coheres them into a successful team.

Common performance goals: Having these goals are very important. We also need to tie these goals to the project’s purpose and the overall performance of the organization. Being able to see that is motivating; it’ll make people work harder. Goals that lack purpose are hollow and uninspiring.

Common approach: There is no need to reinvent the wheel with every work process. As the leader, you need to establish a common way of working from the outset and making sure your team understands and commits to it. To establish this, ask yourself the following questions;

What are the specific jobs to be done and is there a common way of doing them?

How are schedules going to be kept? With a master schedule or a specific tool?

How are decisions going to be made? Collaboratively? Dictatorially?

How are people selected for team membership? As a team leader, do you have control of this or are people placed on your team without your input?

How will any modifications be made?

If you don’t instill a common approach for your team, seeds of discontent will be sewn amongst your team members. It will then become more and more difficult to manage and lead them.

Focusing on the elements of real teams give you more than a fighting chance to “go far.”

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=21712017-03-02T18:25:45Z2017-03-02T18:19:31ZTeam success requires a strong performance culture. You want a team that is committed to accomplishing goals and meeting milestones. … Read more

]]>Team success requires a strong performance culture. You want a team that is committed to accomplishing goals and meeting milestones. With successful teams, fun follows form. We all know of teams that don’t get much done but have a blast and go to happy hour together every Friday, but that’s not what we are talking about here. A team that achieves success is a re-engaged and happy team.

Certainly our Western culture, with its bias toward individualism, can undermine the idea of teamwork and a team culture of performance, but it doesn’t have to. The team should find ways to embrace individual talents. Michael Jordan once said: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” For example, if you have an orchestra, you want the most accomplished musicians. If you interview someone for a technology team, you won’t say, “This person’s brilliant in particular technology, but we can’t use her because she is not going to fit well on the team.” You’ll find a way to make her brilliance work for the team.

So, let’s talk team discipline. As a team begins working together, discipline becomes critical to getting the best from each individual. We see this in sports teams all the time; the members are talented athletes in their own right, but they have the discipline to work together and play well. The same goes for teams in the workplace. Discipline creates the environment for team performance – an environment in which everyone on a team accepts that a project must start and end on time, stay under budget, and satisfy the stakeholder base.

Even though we all know that teams are a necessity in the workplace, people sometimes have a resistance to joining a team. Here are some forms this resistance can take:

Lack of commitment: Our culture tends to celebrate people who do great things on their own, but we often don’t celebrate great teams. Part of the problem is that sometimes the word “team” itself implies imprecision compared to what can be achieved by an individual. For example, you’ve emailed a group of people asking for a response, only to find no one responds because everyone thought someone else would. When you experience these types of situations, committing to the idea of a team as a productive entity can be hard to do.

Personal discomfort and risk: If you are a superstar in your organization, you may feel that joining a team puts your professional reputation at risk; that you’ll be dragged along—and—down by others. We claim “all for one and one for all” but this sentiment generally masks our culture’s belief that individuals matter more. To address this, you need to find a higher purpose.

Weak organizational performance ethic: Is a strong performance ethic a part of a company’s culture? If not—in other words, if teams are not required to perform or aren’t rewarded for performance—then why would you actually want to join a team in that company? Superior team performance has to be baked into the culture of an organization.

Recently FAST COMPANY shared a new study from Glassdoor about the reasons people quit their jobs. Based on analysis of resumes of 5,000+ workers who changed jobs in the last 9 years, researchers identified several trends. Some seem obvious, such as people quitting to work at another company or getting a raise. The much talked about “Work Life Balance” didn’t make the top three!

Last week I was reminded that there’s another reason good employees resign. Career Mystery! In an exit interview I held for a growing mid size company, a star salesperson shared that he wouldn’t have entertained leaving the company had he understood the long term vision the company had for him. He hadn’t appreciated the salary growth, management options and career opportunities available to him. It is critical management ensure key employees understand their value to the company and that regular career pathing discussions are held. In a low unemployment environment, holding on to valuable employees by building and sharing a long term career path, can be an important differentiator when hungry future employers “ come a calling”!

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=21272017-02-20T17:19:41Z2017-02-20T15:34:08ZLeadership and Management are two different functions, but must be aligned. Why? Leadership is about having followers – getting people … Read more

Leadership is about having followers – getting people to understand and believe in your vision and to work with you to achieve your goal. Warren Bennis, accomplished author and leadership scholar, echoes this: “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” How do you get there? By managing. This is more about making sure the day-to-day activities are progressing as they should.

Here are some great examples:

When you challenge how things work as a leader, you then have to implement any change you’ve made to that process as a manger.

While you can inspire a shared vision as a leader, you must institute plans and budgets as a manager. For example, you can be a visionary and say, “We are going to be a $100 million dollar firm,” but you still need to plan and budget for that if it’s going to happen.

As a leader, you need to create alignment and as a manger you have to direct and organize your resources. How can you accomplish this? Aligning your team means ensuring people are on the right teams, teams moving in the right directions, directions that are focused on the right customer and so on. Managers are then responsible for ensuring that company resources such as labor and equipment are organized and pointed in the right direction.

As a leader, you need to create a model for the way people are to follow you. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” – John C. Maxwell. As a manger, you will find yourself solving problems, controlling projects and making sure everything is on schedule and in line.

Good Leaders will motivate with their vision but good managers will make sure the job gets done. Almost everyone is naturally better at one than the other. A balance of these is rarely found at the individual level, but is a requirement at the organizational level.

]]>There’s an old world proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Fast is fun – for a time. You can cover a bunch of territory on your own, but what happens if you break down? If your objective is big and will take you far from your comfort zone, you simply can’t get it done without a team to support you.

Teams present great opportunity because they hold within their ranks a number of ideas and a variety of skill sets. They also have a special production capability: they have the size, the scale, and the scope to tackle a large volume of work, and they benefit from a division of labor. So we use teams to conquer big projects and challenges within the organization. Team success requires a strong performance culture. You want a team that is committed to accomplishing goals and meeting milestones. This is a team that other talented individuals will want to join. We all know of teams that don’t get much done but have fun and go to happy hour together every Friday, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. With successful teams, fun follows form: a team that achieves success is an engaged and happy team.

Certainly our Western culture, with its bias toward individualism and going fast, can undermine the idea of teamwork and a team culture of performance, but it doesn’t have to. The team should find a way to embrace individual talents. For example, if you have an orchestra, you want the most accomplished musicians. If you interview someone for a technology team, you won’t say, “This person’s brilliant in a particular technology, but we can’t use her because she’s not going to fit well on the team.” You’ll find a way to make her brilliance work for the team.

As a team begins to work together, discipline becomes critical to getting the best from every individual. We see this in sports teams all the time; the members are all talented athletes in their own right, but they have the discipline to work together to run plays well. The same goes for teams in the workplace. Discipline creates the environment for team performance—an environment in which everyone on the team accepts that a project must start and end on time, stay under budget, and satisfy the stakeholder base.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together … and stay disciplined!”

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=20972016-11-28T16:05:29Z2016-11-28T16:03:31ZIn a recent conversation with a high achieving CEO, the topic turned to their two senior leaders that have had … Read more

]]>In a recent conversation with a high achieving CEO, the topic turned to their two senior leaders that have had a great year. They were just killing it! Met or exceeded all their goals and are positioned to have another great year. The discussions evolved to, do even these high achievers need a bit of encouragement.

Let’s consider the basics. For many leaders, giving encouragement is the fun part of leading. It’s all about recognizing contributions and celebrating accomplishments. When you warm a person’s heart with a little praise, you’re keeping the flame of motivation glowing. This practice may not come naturally to everyone, however. High achievers, for example, may have the point of view that achievements are simply part of normal operations and don’t need to be remarked on. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by a team of high achievers. Even the coldest of hearts will benefit from encouragement delivered at just the right time.

Let me share an experience from my own life that shows how you can begin to shift your thinking to incorporate best practices. I was at my daughter’s weekend field hockey game, having left her teenage brothers at home with a list of chores to do at the house while I was gone. The boys called me at the game to ask about a few of the chores, and after the call, a friend sitting next to me said, “Well, what incentive do you use to get your boys to do these things?” My response: “I feed them!” My feeling was that it’s what they should be doing anyhow.

But I thought about this on my way home that night and decided I probably should have set the tone a little differently. Instead of just leaving the boys a list of demands for them to take care of on my schedule, I could have had a conversation with them along the lines of “You know, I’d like you to bring in the lawn furniture because the weather’s going to turn in the next month; I’m going to be busy, and I know you could be a big help.” I could’ve shared the vision—the big picture of why these tasks should be done—and encouraged their hearts a little more.

Even high achievers benefit from knowing the vision and a bit of encouragement!

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=20872016-11-09T13:17:28Z2016-11-09T13:11:40ZVirtually all CEOs say the development of their companies’ middle managers is a critical success factor, but research indicates that … Read more

]]>Virtually all CEOs say the development of their companies’ middle managers is a critical success factor, but research indicates that only 28 percent of companies have a program in place that addresses their needs. To turn the tide, organizations need to support and develop middle managers so they can learn to become a new breed of leader–a change leader who knows how to connect, exercise influence, foster trust, and build commitment to a common purpose among far-flung work teams.

“‘Organizations that develop leaders who can deal with and lead change will prosper.’

Coming from one leader to future leaders, O’Neill’s Next Generation Leaders is surprisingly simple to connect with. The material and premise of this book is, in the author’s words, “simple yet profound,” but not a groundbreaking revelation. Change, O’Neill states, is essential for an organization to prosper. Keeping this theme in mind, the reading and content is clearly comprehensible and downright entertaining. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of an aspiring or established leader in any industry.

Few self-help or educational books provide such level of relatability. From the opening page, the author alludes to classic texts like Machiavelli’s The Prince to drive home the idea that change, though filled with perils and uncertainty, is necessary. More importantly, O’Neill rarely meanders with filler text and topic jumps. On the contrary, he is laser focused on the target or targets he believes are central to organizational success (e.g., middle managers).

Aside from stripping away the dense concepts and getting straight to the meat of the content, O’Neill lets his audience catch their breath and synthesize his advice by breaking down subjects into subtopics that generally are no more than a couple pages. Engaging subtopic headlines like “WELCOME TO CHANGE ON STEROIDS,” and “DOING MORE WITH LESS,” provide a clear-cut, but entertaining backdrop to ideas and concepts that can sometimes be tedious and repetitive.

Perhaps the most refreshing and novel aspect of Next Generation Leaders is the author’s seemingly astronomical research efforts. Despite being accomplished and successful in his own right, he integrates the experiences, advice, and anecdotes from one prolific individual after another, until he leaves zero doubt in his readers’ mind that this is the ideal leadership model for future leaders. From John Kotter, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School to three-time Pulitzer recipient and author of The World Is Flat, Tom Friedman, the audience is receiving insight from the best in their respective professions.

A foundational concept that O’Neill emphasizes for successful organizational leadership is the need to leverage relationships and form alliances. To this effect, he cites Elizabethan poet, John Donne, and his famous line from, “For Whom the Bell Tolls:”

No man is an island,Entire of itself.Each is a piece of the continent.A part of the main.

O’Neill is adamant on showing readers his point rather than simply telling them and hoping that it clicks in their minds. He works the same magic with integral subjects for long-lasting change, grouped into an acronym called COACH: “Communicating, Overseeing team development, Aligning business constructs, CREATING the next generation of leaders, and Having a higher purpose.” For each, he explains who the potential targets are (e.g., stakeholders), and devises a chart-based, step-by-step program that aids in visualizing his teachings.

Essential to his belief is great teamwork. Any business-minded book that can incorporate successful team sports experiences, John Wooden stories, and iconic moments like Apollo 13 to show the power of working together, observing, and adapting to one’s circumstances, should be applauded, if for nothing else, for its innovation and creativity. Interestingly, even the complex concepts like constructs are well developed and explained such that a layman with no background in the topic would understand O’Neill’s point.

Another of the multitude of interesting topics is O’Neill’s theory on establishing a culture of ownership, beginning with creating an engaged and empowered team. Instead of the traditional “ask what you can do for your…,” O’Neill is intent on identifying and aligning the “employer’s business opportunity” with employee interests. While this concept is hardly novel and seems straightforward, it is undoubtedly an issue in today’s model of leadership, where many organizations hire for reasons other than fit.

For those who are serious about becoming or hiring strong leaders, Next Generation Leaders is all encompassing. In addition to memorable anecdotes and charts and theories, O’Neill explicitly outlines the dispositions and characteristics a good leader must have, from forward-looking to fundamentally sound mental/emotional health, and trustworthy.

Ultimately, Next Generation Leaders seeks to empower leaders in an ever-evolving workplace by establishing trust, ownership, accountability, and keeping employees engaged. With uncanny simplicity, an engaging writing style, dynamic supporting examples, and a deep dive into components of organizational leadership, valuable information and education drips from every page. All individuals, all learning styles—visual, conceptual, anecdotal, etc.—and all organizations as a whole are highly recommended to make this book required reading in their workforce.”

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=20642016-11-06T14:23:04Z2016-09-22T15:14:34ZThis is my favorite time of the baseball season. For the next few weeks, every pitch and every at-bat is … Read more

]]>This is my favorite time of the baseball season. For the next few weeks, every pitch and every at-bat is amplified. As I’m following the playoff run of my Baltimore Orioles, the New York Mets are signing former NFL quarterback, Tim Tebow. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this young man. Baseball people question his skills. Can he hit a major league slider, can he even compete for playing time at the higher levels of the minor leagues? If I were a baseball exec, I’d sign him because of his work ethic. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but everything I read and hear indicates he is legendary worker and he consistently models the right behavior. He is a Leader!

Leadership gurus Kouzes and Posner call this “modeling the way,” and it’s one of the most powerful leadership practices. In the business world we live in, it’s about setting examples for your team for everything from workplace procedures, dress, and meeting times to e-mail responses, deliverables, and product releases—in other words, everything that you may deal with as a leader and manager.

I attended a meeting recently where a very experienced leader showed up with a written agenda, written action items that had come out of the previous meetings, a written introduction for the new players on the team, and a specific list of outcomes that he wanted from this meeting. He was modeling the way. He had done this a hundred times before and would continue to do this, and it would eventually become part of the culture. He was modeling behavior that others would emulate.

Who is “modeling the way’” in your company? Tim Tebow may never play an inning in the big leagues, but I’ll bet you every minor leaguer in the Mets systems will be positively impacted by his leadership practice of modelling the way. Worth the investment?

]]>0Martin O'Neillhttps://martinoneill.net/?p=20542016-09-20T20:35:33Z2016-09-21T10:00:30ZGuest Post by T.E. Clifton III, CEO, Eastport Analytics, Inc. Business people hear a lot about the critical need for … Read more

Business people hear a lot about the critical need for an “elevator pitch” for their business – a short and persuasive sales pitch. I’ve sat through countless peer advisory meetings where CEOs struggle to express their company’s value in 2 minutes or less. Invariably, this exercise degenerates into a version of “selling the pen”. The CEOs in question usually try to come up with the perfect 100-words-or-less that describe their “pen” – their company, product, service, offering, whatever. And like the actors in “Wolf of Wall Street”, they’re missing the point.

Selling isn’t about describing your product/service/offering; it’s about understanding a prospective client’s needs enough to enable you to tell the story of how their needs will be satisfied by your offering. The same point is made by the old business school mantra “sell holes not drills”. So ditch the “elevator pitch” – what you need is a “Wheelhouse Pitch” – a way to climb in to your prospective client’s wheelhouse, and understand enough about what they’re doing there to be able to tell the story of how your offering could help.

To get started on your Wheelhouse Pitch, first you need a clear idea of who your idealized client is, and how to quickly establish what if any part of their “wheelhouse” enables you to tell your story. Second, you need some process for identifying likely potential clients & how to get to them. And finally you need the story – how is your idealized client’s need satisfied by your offering.

In the late 90’s, I took over as President and CEO of a company named CTX. A small $6M technology services company. As an outsider, I went on a bit of a listening tour and sat down with every manager in the company. When I met with our head of Human Resources and began talking about my view on the importance of company culture and some of the ideas I had around engagement and empowerment, the response was very negative. She made it very clear that my kinds of ideas would never work in this company.

All of us have to learn to challenge the status quo. How many times have you tried to roll out a change of some sort, only to hear “That will never work here” or “That’s not how we do it around here”? As a leader, you have to be comfortable standing up to that attitude. Moreover, you should always be looking for opportunities to change things up, experiment, and take some risks. That’s how your business will improve.

Possessing and developing certain innate strengths helps you become an effective leader. But you also need to use specific leadership practices that have been proven over time to increase your ability to lead people. Challenging the status-quo is one of those practices.

You may be wondering what happened to my subsequent conversations with the Director of HR. Turns out they were very short. She came in the day after we met and offered her resignation – I was happy to oblige.

We went on to interview twelve candidates for the job. For each candidate, I asked them if they received the Society of Human Resources (SHRM) magazine – the periodical of their profession. Each did. I then went on to say that my expectations for this position was that within two years, “they would be on the cover of the SHRM magazine with a tagline of “how to attract and retain in the high tech industry.”” “Can you embrace that challenge”?

Of the twelve candidates, eleven figuratively crawled under the table – the twelfth embraced it. We hired number twelve and never looked back!